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Management of organizational tensions can facilitate the simultaneous advancement of economic, social, and environmental priorities. The approach is based on managers identifying and managing tensions between the three priorities, by employing one of the three strategic responses. Although recent work has provided a theoretical basis for such tension acknowledgment and management, there is a dearth of empirical studies. We interviewed 32 corporate sustainability managers across 25 forestry and wood-products organizations in Australia. Study participants were divided into two groups: (1) those considered effective at corporate sustainability and (2) a status-quo group. Contrary to current theory, our findings showed that acknowledgment of organizational tensions was widespread in the Australian forestry and wood-products industry and not limited to those managers who are effective at managing corporate sustainability. What differed was the degree to which managers did something about the perceived tensions—with the effective group more consistently acting to manage and resolve paradoxical scenarios. Our findings suggest that existing theoretical constructs of tension management may not adequately capture the individual-level complexity involved with managing tensions in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most theory in business ethics is still steeped in rationalist and moral-realist assumptions. However, some seminal neuroscientific studies point to the primacy of moral emotions and intuition in shaping moral judgment. In line with previous interpretations, I suggest that a dual-system explanation of emotional-intuitive automaticity (reflexion) and deliberative reasoning (reflection) is the most appropriate view. However, my interpretation of the evidence also contradicts Greene's conclusion that nonconsequentialist decision making is primarily sentimentalist or affective at its core, while utilitarianism is largely rational-deliberative. Instead, I propose that current research on the human brain, in conjunction with converging experimental evidence, hints at moral subjectivism and its evolutionary basis as the most persuasive explanation of morality. These anti-realist conjectures have far-reaching implications for a wide range of topics in business ethics, as illustrated with the specific case of corporate social responsibility as a potentially tribal conception of the good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what drives corporate social performance (CSP) has become a vital concern for many managers and researchers of large corporations. This study addresses this question by adopting a multilevel, multistakeholder, and multimethod approach to theorize and estimate the relative influence of macro (national business system and country), meso (industry), and micro (firm-level) factors on CSP. Applying three different methods of variance decomposition analysis to an international sample of 2060 large public companies over a time span of 5 years, our results show that firm-level factors explain the largest proportion of variance in aggregate CSP as well as CSP oriented toward communities, the natural environment, and employees. These results support our hypotheses according to which CSP is not primarily driven by macrolevel or mesolevel factors, except for shareholder-oriented CSP, which is relatively more influenced by country-level factors. As a whole, our findings also point to the value of subdividing CSP into its stakeholder-specific components as this disaggregation allows for a more careful examination of distinct drivers of distinct aspects of CSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comprehensive overview and synthesis of the various definitions of corporate environmental performance (CEP) in conceptual and empirical papers. Based on an overview of existing conceptual and empirical studies of CEP, we analyze the complex nature of this multidimensional construct. In a first step, we apply content analysis to the relevant literature to identify definitions of CEP and conduct a bibliometric analysis using the software HistCite. We found only few studies that provide a clear definition of CEP. In a second step, we use a semantic mapping methodology by applying Leximancer, a computer-aided qualitative data analysis tool to organize the large literature on CEP and to explore the definitional and conceptual complexity of CEP. To our knowledge, this is a new and unique approach in the field of environmental management. This paper contributes to research on CEP in three ways. First, it collects and summarizes definitions and measurements of CEP used in the organizational literature so far. Second, it provides a bird's eye view on the different contexts in which CEP is discussed. Third, a parsimonious model of CEP derived from computer-aided qualitative data analysis and consisting of five major elements is presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several well-known statisticians regard significance testing as a deeply problematic procedure in statistical inference. Yet, in-depth discussion of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has largely been absent from the literature on organizations or, more specifically, management control systems. This article attempts to redress this oversight by drawing on neoinstitutional theory to frame, analyze, and explore the NHST problem. Regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive forces partly explain the longevity of NHST in organization studies. The unintended negative consequences of NHST include a reinforcement of the academic-practitioner divide, an obstacle to the growth of knowledge, discouragement of study replications, and mechanization of researcher decision making. An appreciation of these institutional explanations for NHST as well as the harm caused by NHST may ultimately help researchers develop superior methodological alternatives to a controversial statistical technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualises current debates over human rights and transnational corporations. More specifically, we begin by first providing the background to John Ruggie’s appointment as ‘Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises’. Second, we provide a brief discussion of the rise of transnational corporations, and of their growing importance in terms of global governance. Third, we introduce the notion of human rights, and note some difficulties associated therewith. Fourth, we refer to Ruggie’s scholarly work on ‘embedded liberalism’, the ‘global public domain’ and ‘social constructivism’. Following this, we refer to the other five papers contained in this Journal of Business Ethics special issue, ‘Spheres of Influence/Spheres of Responsibility: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights’, and consider some of the potential obstacles to Ruggie’s recent suggestion that a ‘new consensus’ has formed, or is forming, around his ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework. We conclude by raising questions regarding the processes of consensus-building around, and the operationalisation of, Ruggie’s ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been some theoretical and empirical debate that the positive relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and firm financial performance (FFP) is spurious and in fact caused by a third factor, namely large firm size. This study examines this question by integrating three meta-analyses of more than two decades of research on (1) CSP and FFP, (2) firm size and CSP, and (3) firm size and FFP into one path-analytic model. The present study does not confirm size as a third factor which would confound the relationship between CSP and FFP. That is, even if firm size is controlled for across studies (comprising, on average, over 15 000 observations), CSP and FFP remain positively correlated, showing a "true-score" corrected path coefficient p of 0.37. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]